Technical note - BlueStacks network activity and Internet usage

Purpose

Dispel the misconception that BlueStacks appears to use a lot of internet bandwidth. If you monitor Network Activity via Resource Monitor you may observe very high network usage by BlueStacks. Please do not be alarmed, this is NOT internet usage but local network based communication within BlueStacks' processes locally on your PC.

Benefits

Promotes clarity about BlueStacks’ network activity and Internet usage and confidence about its performance.

Audience

Advanced technically-oriented users who are familiar with Windows tools and utilities.

BlueStacks versions affected

All

Analysis

Sometimes users may observe high internet usage while using BlueStacks. To verify this, you may use the resource monitor on your PC. Open the Windows Task Manager (Press "Ctrl+Shift+Esc" on your keyboard). Open the Resource Monitor using the the link at the bottom of the Task Manager’s screen.

In the above image we can see high network activity by BlueStacks. However on analyzing this further, the Resource Manager is showing the sum of local and Internet traffic, by local traffic we mean the communication between various BlueStacks processes running on your PC. Next, you may navigate to TCP connections tab on the Resource Monitor’s screen.

Note: If you are unable to view all the columns in the TCP connections tab, right click and choose Select Columns. Select all those columns in this list to view relevant detail.

Our intention is to verify that the majority of the BlueStacks processes and services are in local communication with each other but not communicating with remote IP addresses. Nominally,any process or service that is downloading or interacting with the Internet will have a corresponding remote address for the entity it is communicating with.

However, you will observe that all the BlueStacks processes that are running on your PC have loopback addresses, which are purely local to your PC. They have no communication with a remote counterpart. Contrast this with Chrome, which is communicating with several remote websites in the same screenshot.You will notice that the HD-Plus service is using the Internet and communicating with a remote site at the IP address 172.217.26.170. You may lookup and identify the remote IP address HD-Plus service is communicating with at https://www.whois.com .

In the above example, HD-Plus service is most likely downloading apps from Google Play. You can also see that the internet usage is not very high while BlueStacks is in use. You may review the Task Manager to see that only Wi-Fi is in use.

The Task Manager’s network tab also shows that BlueStacks is using negligible bandwidth.

We genuinely appreciate your choosing BlueStacks. We hope you enjoy using it. If you have any further questions, please contact us at support dot bluestacks dot com. Thank you very much.